Einstein Politicized: The Early Reception of Relativity in Italy

Abstract

In Italy as elsewhere amid the turbulence following World War I, the reception of Einstein’s theories of relativity took on distinctive political colorings in certain settings. This paper analyzes two such episodes. The first focuses on the language used in scientists’ writings, for audiences wider than the community of practitioners; about what had earlier been termed a “revolutionary” theory in the context of the new climate of revolution in postwar society and politics. Stalking the metaphors they used, such as revolution and evolution, destruction and construction, facilitates understanding of the variety of impacts of relativity within the scientific community, especially on scientists’ views of the relation of theory to experiment and the nature of scientific growth and change. Scientists’ publicly expressed opinions of scientific development were transformed by the postwar political situation from an easy acceptance of revolutionary change in science to a rejection of it and an adherence to an evolutionary, progressive view. Furthermore, this new gradualist view stimulated the doing of science: the mathematical physicist Tullio Levi-Civita wrote what became an influential paper in all Latin countries, entitled, “How a conservative could reach the threshold of the new mechanics.”